How Europe’s Way of Denial Became a Way of Death

Europe’s immigration woes underscore how much of the continent is living in untruth—in lies that gradually kill.

“Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.” “Islam is a religion of peace.” These are invariably among the first statements we hear from European politicians following yet another jihadist attack in Western Europe.

Leaving aside the deeply contestable theological and historical claims underlying such statements, they underscore something else that, in the view of Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Islam, Identity, is slowly draining the life out of Europe. And that something else is a will—verging on the pathological—on many Europeans’ part to deny reality: realities about Islamic belief and practice, facts about Muslim immigration, and truths about European culture and history.

This habit of what I will call “living in untruth,” Murray contends, is facilitating political decisions by many Europeans that, taken together, reflect a type of civilizational despair. European culture—by which Murray means the heritage of Jewish and Christian faith, Greece and Rome, and the various Enlightenments—is being emptied out by two developments about which many of those most responsible for Europe’s future are doing precisely nothing.